1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to servicing and repairing machines. More specifically, the present invention relates to the servicing of equipment at remote (customer) locations.
2. Background of the Related Art
As the value and use of information continues to increase, individuals and businesses seek additional ways to process and store information. One option available to users is information handling systems. An information handling system generally processes, compiles, stores, and/or communicates information or data for business, personal, or other purposes thereby allowing users to take advantage of the value of the information. Because technology and information handling needs and requirements vary between different users or applications, information handling systems may also vary regarding what information is handled, how the information is handled, how much information is processed, stored, or communicated, and how quickly and efficiently the information may be processed, stored, or communicated. The variations in information handling systems allow for information handling systems to be general or configured for a specific user or specific use such as financial transaction processing, airline reservations, enterprise data storage, or global communications. In addition, information handling systems may include a variety of hardware and software components that may be configured to process, store, and communicate information and may include one or more computer systems, data storage systems, and networking systems. Moreover, the information handling system may include one or more software applications, each of which can be composed of one or more software components.
Software components that access Baseboard Management Controller (“BMC”) data, such as the Basic Input-Output System (“BIOS”), firmware on out-of-band management peripheral cards, and systems management software, have to read all of the meta data (e.g., IPMI Sensor Data Records (“SDR”)) that describe the system's sensors from the BMC. Reading from the BMC is done even if only one particular sensor needs to be accessed. The typical size of an “SDR” is 64 bytes and a typical system has over one hundred SDR's. Therefore, the software has to read over 6400 bytes of data from the IPMB BUS. In addition, the parsing logic needs to be duplicated across all software that utilizes the IPMI SDR's. The reading and parsing cause performance degradation. For example, some information handling systems will have memory sensors. All of the data for the memory sensors will be provided by the BIOS during the POST phase of booting. In order for the BIOS to send the information for each sensor, the BIOS needs to know the address of each memory sensor. The BIOS thus must locate the memory sensors by reading all of the SDR's via the slow I2C bus and then parse each SDR. The reading and parsing steps adds considerable delay to the BIOS POST process. Moreover, the BIOS must also be equipped with logic to understand and interpret the SDR data records, increasing the size of the BIOS. There is, therefore, a need in the art for ameliorating performance degradation and reducing overhead costs for accessing BMC data.